or is it just me?
Search algorithms are designed to return the most relevant results to a user's query. Which is generally a good thing, a positive service they provide to internet users (of course while making some money for themselves in the process)
Search engine "optimisation" exists only to subvert that process and return your site higher than anyone else's, regardless of how irrelevant it probably is. I'm always put off a site when I see visible signs of this practice; ie user-unfriendly URLs with long strings of keywords in them, page titles with same, semi-hidden pages bearing strangely-worded paragraphs and so on. As well as marking them out as a user of what I believe to be an unethical marketing technique, it just looks unprofessional - like businesses that name themselves AAAAAAAAAAAAAAJohn's Used Cars to be first in the phonebook.
SEO's are scum. SEOs are no different than Nigerian scammers or fucknoids who sent out mass spam emails.
>>1
a lot of search engines actually rank sites lower for doing things like that. get a better search engine, and stop seeing that shit.
>>3
What is your understanding of a "better search engine" I wonder, and what adaption does it have to reality? That is, which search engine would you say is "good enough" (for some value to be enough)? If the answers google, read this: Google recently has changed its search engine to help wikipedia. Wikipedia has a major bandwidth problem and it strives to keep it low, that's why there's the "star" feature which makes an article read only for most users. These stars are given based on bandwidth consumption for the particular article (notice the calculations are more sophisicated than the sum of bytes transfered, since that'd mean a long article or an article with lots of media would rank high much easier than corresponding short one). If the article gets visited a lot, then it gets the star. Also, don't forget that Wikipedia does not stand alone on the matter of its existence, else it'd be dead time ago. Another problem of Wikipedia is that it got linked too much - simply too many people reference Wikipedia. Google ranked it higher than any other link in most results for which there was an article for it. That of course is something good, because wikipedia articles are up to par (for NON-technical endeavors). But google is massive, and wikipedia had to look for a way to free itself from such heavy weight put on its shoulders by google. The contract roughly was:
Articles which address diachronic concepts or factualities are still ranked on top; (th. Wikipedia dominates the academia using google), Therefore, articles which are regularly changed (in content, not appearance), such as present pseudo-historic commentary, trends, fashion, products, etc get a lower ranking; in particularly, there's a minimum 2 ranks distance (wikipedia is bound to the third position or lower, depending on its relevance to the query and of course the competitor websites which demand a place higher than WK), and other websites get to have their content 'highlighted'. That pleases both Wikipedia and everyone who was unpleased with the mass of Wikipedia (every advertising agency, even google). So you can see how this occured. Google became biased, more than it was before, if any. Lo - search engines return scrambled information: you have to fiddle through it with some criteria and judge.
SEO is just a symptom of the cancer that is the advertisement-supported web.